Quotes & Sayings About Loneliness From Books

The point of books is to combat loneliness. — David Foster Wallace

She thought it must be a lonely life for a boy who hated books. — Hilda Van Stockum

I thought about the people I had met who were in pain but were pretending that everything was fine. And I thought, this is what books can do for us: they can acknowledge our experience and take the lid off our isolation and make us feel less alone. To me, books have always been a great source of comfort
not because they allow for escapism (though that's certainly one of their benefits) but because they offer recognition. Face to face with other people, we might give in to the impulse to pretend that everything is "fine"; but when we open the cover of a book
I'm talking mostly about novels here
there is no shame and no need to pretend. Good fiction has never lied to me. When I immerse myself in a book I feel recognized and therefore relieved. I turn the pages and think, yes, I have felt that too
that loneliness and joy and anxiety and confusion and fear. When I read, what once seemed meaningless gains meaning, and I am not alone. — Julie Schumacher

The sun loved me again when it saw that the stars would not abandon me. — Jenim Dibie

Many people are afraid of Emptiness, however, because it reminds them of Loneliness. Everything has to be filled in, it seems-appointment books, hillsides, vacant lots-but when all the spaces are filled, the Loneliness really begins. Then the Groups are joined, the Classes are signed up for, and the Gift-to-Yourself items are bought. When the Loneliness starts creeping in the door, the Television Set is turned on to make it go away. But it doesn't go away. So some of us do instead, and after discarding the emptiness of the Big Congested Mess, we discover the fullness of Nothing. — Benjamin Hoff

When my head is in the typewriter the last thing on my mind is some imaginary reader. I don't have an audience; I have a set of standards. But when I think of my work out in the world, written and published, I like to imagine it's being read by some stranger somewhere who doesn't have anyone around him to talk to about books and writing - maybe a would-be writer, maybe a little lonely, who depends on a certain kind of writing to make him feel more comfortable in the world. — Don DeLillo

The point of books was to combat loneliness — David Lipsky

But about the drip drip of long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. They don't know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the laundrette. Or to sit in a darkened flat on Halloween night, because you can't bear to expose your bleak evening to a crowd of jeering trick-or-treaters. Or to have the librarian smile pityingly and say, 'Goodness, you're a quick reader!' when you bring back seven books, read from cover to cover, a week after taking them out. They don't know what it is to be so chronically untouched that the accidental brush of a bus conductor's hand on your shoulder sends a jolt of longing straight to your groin. — Zoe Heller

When you read a book and its words agree with what you think, your view of the world or your feelings at the time, you discover that there are people out there that think like you. That takes away a feeling of loneliness. — Innocent Mwatsikesimbe

Most of us do things for reasons that are more purely personal. For love, or for hate. — Cassandra Clare

She loved sinking into her bed on evenings like this, but apparently she shouldn't, because it worried her aunts, who thought she ought to be out dancing. It worried her a little bit, too, because what if they were right, and because sometimes a great loneliness welled up in her and threatened all the dams she built to hold it back. You couldn't cure loneliness by wallowing in it, up above the world, on an island removed from everything. She knew that. But she had such a hard time with all the cures. They seemed rough and brusque and brutal, as if they abused her skin with a pot scrubber ... forcing herself into a mass of people, a stranger among strangers ... But it was much more tempting to curl up with a book under her thick white comforter.
Still, sometimes after she curled up, she regretted her lack of courage and felt bleakly lonely.
It was important to have a really good book. — Laura Florand

She read absorbedly books found in boarding-house parlours, in hotels, in such public libraries as the times afforded. She was alone for hours a day, daily. Frequently her father, fearful of loneliness for her, brought her an armful of books and she had an orgy, dipping and swooping about among them in a sort of gourmand's ecstasy of indecision. In this way, at fifteen, she knew the writings of Byron, Jane Austen, Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Felicia Hemans. Not to speak of Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth, Bertha M. Clay, and that good fairy of the scullery, the Fireside Companion, in whose pages factory girls and dukes were brought together as inevitably as steak and onions. These last were, of course, the result of Selina's mode of living, and were loaned to her by kind-hearted landladies, chambermaids, and waitresses all the way from California to New York. — Edna Ferber

I write because I want to end my loneliness. Books make people less alone. That, before and after everything else, is what books do. They show us that conversations are possible across distances. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish ... You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger. — Simone De Beauvoir

Books had gotten her through many years of loneliness. They kept dreams alive inside her soul and taught her of love that always seemed so far from her reach. And — Victoria James

There's a beautiful poem at the beginning of a collection of books we call the Bible. In that poem, it is written: "Then God said, 'Let us make man.'"

God then recognized that it was not good for man to be alone.

We can all agree on that one, I think. Loneliness is one of the most excruciating pains that the human heart, or any heart, has to go through.

What did God do about it?

What was His remedy?

What was His answer?

He created marriage. He didn't create dating, He didn't create courting - He created marriage. — Cole Ryan

Our job, then, is two-fold: to focus on our own failings as writers. But also to speak more forcefully as advocates for literature. Books are a powerful antidote for loneliness, for the moral purposelessness of the leisure class. It's our job to convince the 95 percent of people who don't read books, who instead medicate themselves in front of screens, that literary art isn't some esoteric tradition, but a direct path to meaning, to an understanding of the terror that lives beneath our consumptive ennui. — Steve Almond

Books make the best ersatz friendships. — Nenia Campbell

Home. the word always had air quotes around it in her mind. She'd done what she could to make her flat cozy, filling it with art, books, ornate lanterns, and a Persian carpet as soft as lynx fur. And of course there were her angel wings taking up one whole wall. But there was no help for the real emptiness; its close air was stirred by no breath but her own. When she was alone, the empty place within her, the missingness, as she thought of it, seemed to swell. Even being with Kaz had done something to keep it at bay, though not enough. Never enough. — Laini Taylor

There are a few books I have read that I've never been the same after, and I think all good writing somehow addresses the concern of and acts as an anodyne against loneliness. We're all terribly, terribly lonely. And there's a way, at least in prose fiction, that can allow you to be intimate with the world and with a mind and with characters that you just can't be in the real world.
I don't know what you're thinking. I don't know that much about you as I don't know that much about my parents or my lover or my sister, but a piece of fiction that's really true allows you to be intimate with ... I don't want to say people, but it allows you to be intimate with a world that resembles our own in enough emotional particulars so that the way different things must feel is carried out with us into the real world.
I think what I would like my stuff to do is make people less lonely. — David Foster Wallace

What she did learn from all the books was something else, something she hadn't really been expecting, which was that the story of loneliness is much longer than the story of life. In the sense of what most people mean by living, she said. Without children or partner, without meaningful family or a home, a day can last an eternity: a life without those things is a life without a story, a life in which there is nothing - no narrative dramas - to alleviate the cruelly meticulous passing of time. — Rachel Cusk

I've shepherded a good many people through their lives, I've baptized babies by the hundred, and all that time I have felt as though a great part of life was closed to me. Your mother says I was like Abraham. But I had no old wife and no promise of a child. I was just getting by on books and baseball and fried-egg sandwiches. — Marilynne Robinson

It would be so great to have someone my own age to talk to, even if it was just about books. — Alex Flinn

My books are based on the "what if" principle. "What if you became invisible?" or "What if you did change into your mother for one day?" I then take it from there. Each book takes several months in the long process of writing, rewriting, writing, rewriting, and each has its own set of problems. The one thing I dislike about the writing process is the sometimes-loneliness of it all. Readers only get to see the glamour part of a bound book, not some of the agonizing moments one has while constructing it. — Mary Rodgers

We lie under the sheet
after making love, speaking
of loneliness
relieved in a book
relived in a book
so on that page
the clot and fissure
of it appears
words of a man
in pain
a naked word
entering the clot
a hand grasping
through bars:

deliverance

What happens between us
has happened for centuries
we know it from literature

still it happens

sexual jealousy
outflung hand
beating bed

dryness of mouth
after panting

there are books that describe all this
and they are useless — Adrienne Rich

books are the arms which murder isolation, drive away loneliness, fulfill a friend's company. — Self-Realization Fellowship

I don't think that loneliness is necessarily a bad or unconstructive condition. My own skill at jamming time may actually be dependent on some fluid mixture of emotions, among them curiosity, sexual desire, and love, all suspended in a solvent medium of loneliness. I like the heroes or heroines of books I read to be living alone, and feeling lonely, because reading is itself a state of artificially enhanced loneliness. Loneliness makes you consider other people's lives, makes you more polite to those you deal with in passing, dampens irony and cynicism. The interior of the Fold is, of course, the place of ultimate loneliness, and I like it there. But there are times when the wish for others' voices, for friendliness returned, reaches unpleasant levels, and becomes a kind of immobilizing pain. That was how it felt as I finished packing up the box of sex machines. — Nicholson Baker

Books are my refuge. I can crawl into the space between the pages and curl my back to loneliness. — Anubhav Mishra

Outside, across the putrid moat and under the dark mute trees, I would often lie and dream for hours about what I read in the books; and would longingly picture myself amidst gay crowds in the sunny world beyond the endless forests. — H.P. Lovecraft

Thus it had come about that she had read far more fiction, and far more poetry, those two sanctuaries of the lonely, than most of her kind. — John Fowles

I agree with Proust in this, he says, that books create their own silences in ways that friends rarely do. And the silence that grows palpable when one has finished a canto of Dante, he says, is quite different from the silence that grows palpable when one has reached the end of Oedipus at Colonus. The most terrible thing that has happened to people today, he says, is that they have grown frightened of silence. Instead of seeking it as a friend and as a source of renewal they now try in every way they can to shut it out ... the fear of silence is the fear of loneliness, he says, and the fear of loneliness is the fear of silence. People fear silence, he says, because they have lost the ability to trust the world to bring about renewal. Silence for them means only the recognition that they have been abandoned ... How can people find the strength to be happy if they are so terrified of silence? — Gabriel Josipovici

American dream,
a spouse,
a brace of children,
cuddly pets,
coffee-table books,
rusted skeleton keys,
plastic cauliflower bags,
business cards of business-card printers,
a mound of used airmail envelopes.
Old house on moving day,
all echoes and loneliness. — Brian D'Ambrosio

My books are always about somebody who is taken from aloneness and isolation - often elevated loneliness - to community. It may be a denigrated community that is filthy and poor, but they are not alone; they are with people. — Chuck Palahniuk

Will: I've never seen anyone get so excited over books before. You'd think they were diamonds.
Tessa: Well, they are, aren't they? Isn't there anything you love like that? — Cassandra Clare

Miss Abigail, I want to be an author because writers know when a person is lonely. I mean, when Molly read me some books, those writers reached out and said, Look Gideon, we know about your loneliness and we know you're feeling downtrodden. And they said ... I'll stand up for you. You're not lone anymore. — Leon Uris

When you jump onto the emptiness of the loneliness, the best parachute to land you safely will be the books! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Once I accepted the fact that I was bad luck, I shied away from group activities. And groups. And activities. I started spending a lot of time in my room, tucked under my covers reading books. There's only so much damage a book can do, and I wasn't worried about hurting myself. Accidentally hurting yourself is way better than hurting other people.
Sure, I got lonely for a while. But getting invited to slumber parties just wasn't worth the stress of wondering if I might accidentally burn down the house with my flat iron or be the only survivor of a freak sleepover massacre. And loneliness is just like everything else - if you endure it long enough, you get used to it. — Paula Stokes

This blessing of loneliness was not really loneliness. Real loneliness was something unendurable. What one wanted when exhausted by the noise and impact of physical bodies was not no people but disembodied people; all those denizens of beloved books who could be taken to one's heart and put away again, in silence, and with no hurt feelings. — Elizabeth Goudge

Books had been invented to salve human loneliness, and they were friends without peer, friends who never sneered or flinched or laughed behind a man's back. Books revealed their treasures to all who took the effort to seek. — Mary Jo Putney

One thing became crystal clear to me when I couldn't see you anymore. I realized that the only way I had been able to survive until then was having you in my life. When I lost you, the pain and loneliness really got to me. — Haruki Murakami

It ... whatever 'it' is, has swallowed me and I lie here in the pit of its cold dark stomach being eaten alive by its bile and I ... I don't even know if I want to be saved. — Kellie Elmore

The first bowl sleekly moistened throat and lips, The second banished all my loneliness The third expelled the dullness from my mind, Sharpening inspiration gained from all the books I've read. The fourth brought forth light perspiration, Dispersing a lifetimes troubles through my pores. The fifth bowl cleansed every atom of my being. The sixth has made me kin to the Immortals. This seventh ... I can take no more. — Lu Tong

A book,
a book full
of human touches,
of shirts,
a book
without loneliness, with men
and tools,
a book
is victory. — Pablo Neruda

There were two immediate results of my forced loneliness: I began to find company in books, and greater pleasure in music. — James Weldon Johnson

There are so many works of the mind, so much humanity, that to disburden ourselves of ourselves is an understandable temptation. Open a book and a voice speaks. A world, more or less alien or welcoming, emerges to enrich a reader's store of hypotheses about how life is to be understood. As with scientific hypotheses, even failure is meaningful, a test of the boundaries of credibility. So many voices, so many worlds, we can weary of them. If there were only one human query to be heard in the universe, and it was only the sort of thing we were always inclined to wonder about
Where did all this come from? or, Why could we never refrain from war?
we would hear in it a beauty that would overwhelm us. So frail a sound, so brave, so deeply inflected by the burden of thought, that we would ask, Whose voice is this? We would feel a barely tolerable loneliness, hers and ours. And if there were another hearer, not one of us, how starkly that hearer would apprehend what we are and were. — Marilynne Robinson

Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to. — Alain De Botton

Too many thousands of opened books yawned between them and him. He had exiled himself. — Jack London

I spent the rest of the day in someone else's story. The rare moments that I put the book down, my own pain returned in burning stabs. — Amy Plum

It's just that you go so crazy being alone like that. Sometimes he'd forget my water or food and I'd cry and cry and cry." She stops talking and looks out the window. "I would try to tell myself stories to pass the time. Fairy tales. Parts of books. But they got used up. — Holly Black

Let this little book be thy friend, if, owing to fortune or through thine own fault, thou canst not find a dearer companion. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

After she disappeared inside the hotel, Pasquale entertained the unwieldy thought that he'd somehow summoned her, that after years of living in this place, after months of grief and loneliness and waiting for Americans, he'd created this woman from old bits of cinema and books, from the lost artifacts and ruins of his dreams, from his epic, enduring solitude. He glanced over at Orenzio, who was carrying someone's bags, and the whole world suddenly seemed so unlikely, our time in it so brief and dreamlike. He'd never felt such a detached, existential sensation, such terrifying freedom - it was as if he were hovering above the village, above his own body - and it thrilled him in a way that he could never have explained. — Jess Walter

In truth, she disliked books. She felt a peculiar disquiet when opening the pages. She had felt it since childhood. She did not know why. Something in the act itself, the immersion, the seclusion, was disturbing. Reading was an affirmation of being alone, of being separate, trapped. Books were like oubliettes. Her preference was for company, the tactile world, atoms. — Sarah Hall

It was so odd what brought out tenderness in people. It was never what you have expected. — Cassandra Clare

I never really had any close friends in India, and I felt a terrible loneliness and isolation for many years. Westernized Indians don't like my books and I tend not to like westernized Indians - so we're quits. — Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Well
there are two kinds of loneliness, aren't there? There's the loneliness of absolute solitude
the physical fact of living alone, working alone, as I have always done. This need not be painful. For many writers it's necessary. Others need a female staff of family servants to type their bloody books and keep the their egos afloat. Being alone for most of the day means that you listen to different rhythms, which are not determined by other people. I think it's better so. But there is another kind of loneliness which is terrible to endure ... And that is the loneliness of seeing a different world from that of the people around you. Their lives remain remote from yours. You can see the gulf and they can't. You live among them. They walk on earth. You walk on glass. They reassure themselves with conformity, with carefully constructed resemblances. You are masked, aware of your absolute difference. — Patricia Duncker

I was a lonely boy. I spent all my time reading books and watching the world. [some] tried to draw me out at first, but their hearts weren't in it. And after all, they had enough troubles of their own. — Rabih Alameddine

Maybe reading was just a way to make her feel less alone, to keep her company. When you read something you are stopped, the moment is stayed, you can sometimes be there more fully than you can in your real life. — Helen Humphreys

The thought of people reading in the sun, on a beach, tempts me to recommend dark books, written in the shadow of loneliness, despair, and death. Let these revelers feel a chill as they loll on their towels. — Anatole Broyard

Simple answers to the most difficult questions:

1. Why do humans find it difficult to express themselves?

To relate to the movies and books, later.


2. Why do humans make everything look so big, beautiful & complicated?

Ego feels good.


3. Why do humans want to protect the nature?

Because they can't even protect themselves. Moreover, they are guilty conscious.


4. What is romance?

It is complicated as far as humans are concerned.


5. What is love?

The complicated part of the fourth question.


6. What is unconditional love?

Not there yet.


7. Who is God?

Sixth leads you to the seventh.


8. Who am I?

Ask yourself.


9. What is loneliness?

Potential energy wasted on learned answers.


10. What is happiness?

All of the above. — Saurabh Sharma

Mistasinon stood as the music of life flowed around him, the instrument of his agency muted. — F.D. Lee